Castle Paradox

chronoboy · Posted: Wed Nov 10, 2010 3:46 pm Post subject: Have you ever heard of Parrot?

I was reading around the net this evening on virtual machines and such and came across this very interesting project called Parrot.

Before the mods move this article, please finish reading it as it does relate to OHRRPGCE development, and is very technical in nature.

Parrot is a virtual machine which has been around for a few years now, since it's inception, many programming languages have been ported to it's virtual machine... And what do I see has been ported to it? QuickBasic 4.5 out of all things.

Okay, so now since Parrot can easily be cross-compiled to many platforms, as simply as the Java VM can now be(Java has been open sourced recently). I am wondering if it would be possible to compile an older version of OHR, one that can be compiled on QuickBasic 4.5.

I see this being an interesting experiment to see how capable Parrot might be and even benchmark it with a native DOS version to see performance differences.

Perhaps Parrot might be a way to cross-compile OHR to other platforms and processors. The source code for the QuickBasic 4.5 compiler in Parrot is available. Technically, a fork and modifications to support newer FreeBASIC statements should yield a Virtual Machine capable of running the latest and greatest OHR releases without any re-coding effort, just add that new FB statement into the VM and re-compile OHR.

Over the next few days during my free time, I will play with the QB45 compatible OHR source and Parrot and post any updates to see if this is a viable solution to run OHR away from the Intel platform.

Parrot's website can be found here: http://www.parrot.org/

UPDATE: Well it seems most of the functionality needed to make OHR work are currently missing. However, since there is working code, adding them should not be as much effort as doing everything from scratch. Here is the latest README file on the project, I have also sent an Email to the maintainer(which was bounced back):
https://github.com/parrot/parrot/blob/RELEASE_0_9_1/languages/BASIC/compiler/BASIC_README

I'll take a look at the code and see if I am able to program it effectively. My first effort will be to definitely make the QB45 version of OHR compile and run in Parrot. After which I will work on making newer versions of OHR compatible with it, perhaps at one point releasing a Parrot version along side the OHR release. Parrot can make binary files such as EXE and ELFs. The Parrot versions will be mainly for non-Intel devices, where FreeBASIC is not currently an option.
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Current project: Chronoboy Adventures

Website: http://www.chronoboy.com/

TMC · Posted: Thu Nov 11, 2010 12:07 am Post subject:

Bob the Hamster · Posted: Thu Nov 11, 2010 9:54 am Post subject:

The last version of the OHRRPGCE that could be compiled on QuickBasic was 'hasta-la-qb'. it was released a little more than 4 years ago, so any possible Parrot port of it would only be useful for games that are at least that old. Nothing newer would work.